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David Petraeus, the disgraced general and former head of the CIA, recently told ABC’s “This Week” the “heroic” people of Mariupol, Ukraine are “fighting to the last defender, and pinning down multiple Russian battalions and doing so very heroically. But ultimately, it looks as if it’s going to have to collapse, it’s going to be taken. And when it does that is a moment of some peril for Ukraine, because now that port can be used by the Russians,” Newsweek reports.
Petraeus, of course, left out an important detail about the city of Mariupol, located on the Sea of Azov, an arm of the Black Sea. The besieged city is home base for the Azov Battalion, now known as the Azov Special Operations Detachment, a group of violent Neo-Nazis. Andriy Biletsky, the original commander of the far rightwing paramilitary, has said he believes the mission of Ukraine is to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led subhumans.”
Members of the group wear Nazi insignia and blazon, including SS rune symbols. The Azov Battalion insignia features the Wolfsangel symbol, inspired by medieval wolf traps, and later adopted by the Nazis as a heraldry charge. The Wolfsangel was used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, an elite division of the Waffen-SS.
“Azov Battalion is reportedly a unit of the NGU [the National Guard of Ukraine], backed by Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs,” Huang Lanlan and Cui Fandi reported for Global Times on March 7. “Despite its possible official background in Ukraine, Azov Battalion is known in the West for its extreme neo-Nazi stance, and for its suspected involvement in a number of terrorist attacks and separatist incitement incidents in various countries and regions, including the riots in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019.”
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), in a report dated May 15, 2016, details kidnappings, torture, rape, disappearances, and other violent acts committed by the Azov Battalion, as well as crimes committed by members of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, lately recognized by Russia.
The corporate media, prior to the Russian “de-nazification” incursion, ran stories on this group of white supremacists. However, because much of the corporate media is essentially state-run propaganda media, we now hear little about the Azov Battalion.
In fact, the propaganda media now insists the group is at the forefront of the effort to defeat Russia.
“There were no Nazi battalions roaming around the streets and trying to embed into [the government] system, as the Kremlin is trying to portray,” Ruslan Leviev, an analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, a group of investigative journalists tracking the Russian military in Ukraine, told CBS News.
Mariupol is a city of nearly a half million people. It is largely socialist and communist. The city’s political parties are pro-Russian; at the turn of the century, the Party of Regions (the largest party in Ukraine) dominated the City Council, followed by the Socialist Party of Ukraine.
Despite this, and contrary to corporate propaganda and the assertion made by Biletsky, the Azov Battalion served as a police detachment in Mariupol prior to its incorporation into the Ukrainian national guard. In other words, these violent, fanatical neo-Nazis were “roaming the streets” of Mariupol, and undoubtedly spreading their racist ideology. The OHCHR report underscores the repeated use of “arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment” that “remain deeply entrenched practices” by Azov and the state government in Kyiv. (See “You Don’t Exist, Arbitrary Detentions, Enforced Disappearances, and Torture in Eastern Ukraine,”Human Rights Watch, July 21, 2016.)
As history demonstrates, the CIA prefers radical, fanatical, and brutal groups to carry out its subversion operations abroad, thus the Azov Battalion is a natural. “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s accusation that Ukraine advocated Nazism, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion seemed proof of his claim. But further research seems to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in establishing and funding the white supremacist paramilitary,” Israel 365 reported in early March.
Beginning in January 2022, the CIA began secretly training the Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian military for war, according to a story posted by a national security correspondent for Yahoo News earlier this month.
According to the Global Times,
The multi-week program includes training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, said the former officials. In addition to the above-mentioned, the CIA also started “traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there by 2015,” Yahoo reported.
That same year, the Global Times noted, Congress
removed a ban on funding neo-Nazi groups like Azov Battalion from its year-end spending bill, said an article by The Nation magazine in January 2016. In July 2015, two Congressmen drew up an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations bill that limited “arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion,” but the amendment was removed in November following “pressure from the Pentagon,” an insider told The Nation.
The CIA’s “Ground Department,” the latest permutation of the agency’s former “special operations” (subversion, overturning elections, assassinating foreign leaders), has been in eastern Ukraine since at least 2016. Officers of the Ground Department, according to Jack Murphy at SoFrep, are “among the baddest-ass military units—SEALs, Marine Force Recon, Air Force parajumpers, and the Army’s Combat Applications Group (formerly known as Delta Force).” However, according to the author, the CIA prefers to use the “quiet professionals” assigned to the US Army’s Special Forces unit.
In short, the CIA is sending professional killers and mass murder technicians to assist the Azov Battalion and the Zelenskyy government military in its terror and ethnic cleansing campaign in Donbas.
No longer able to fight conventional war against its adversaries—taking into consideration the “failures” of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria—the US decided some time ago to fight wars by proxy. Afghanistan and Pakistan under the directorship of William Casey are a case in point. The US funded and Pakistan trained tribal mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, later including al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, in their jihad against the Soviet Union’s western influence and its government in Kabul.
In July, 1992, published in the CIA’s newspaper, The Washington Post, we learn
Casey’s visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire. (Emphasis mine.)
The CIA is involved in training and arming Ukraine’s fiercest fighters, that is to say primarily fanatical anti-Russian nationalists and neo-Nazis. They are on the frontline of the stalled effort to cleanse the Donbas of its Russian-speaking inhabitants and reclaim the territory for the government in Kyiv.
An example may be the largely unverified reports of Ukrainian marksmen killing a number of Russian generals. If true, the murderous handiwork of the US Army Marksmanship Unit comes to mind.
If we judge past history, we should assume many if not most of the weapons now flooding into Ukraine are being supplied by the United States. As of this writing, those weapons include the “Javelin, a shoulder-held anti-tank weapon that shoots heat-seeking rockets hurtling towards targets up to 4km (2.5 miles) away,” and other armaments, including “drones that can be turned into flying bombs and anti-aircraft weapons that can shoot helicopters from the sky,” in other words, the latest military tech.
Any rational person would conclude that by directly aiding and arming Ukraine and its nationalists and neo-nazis, we are currently at work with Russia. Vladimir Putin has said as much.
“These sanctions that are being imposed are akin to a declaration of war but thank God it has not come to that,” Putin said, warning that any country that imposes a no-fly zone over Ukraine is inviting retaliation.
“We will immediately consider them as participants in a military conflict, and it doesn’t matter members of which organizations they are,” Putin said. “It is impossible to do it, on the very territory of Ukraine, it’s possible only from the territory of some neighboring states. But any movement in this direction will be considered by us as participation in an armed conflict.” (Emphasis mine.)
So, here we are, at a momentary stalemate, if media reports can believed, and nobody knows how far the cerebrally deficient Biden will go. He has already slandered Putin, calling him a “butcher,” “war criminal,” and a “murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.”
For some, this sort of cartoonish rhetoric equals fighting words. For now we are spared the horrific prospect of nuclear war, no matter how limited, or “dialed down” the nukes are.
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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from CovertAction Magazine
